Work Text:
The steak was a bribe and they both knew it.
Cory didn't say this out loud. She sat on the kitchen counter eating it anyway, because it was good and she wasn't an idiot, and because Jason had made it without being asked which meant he was in one of his moods where he processed concern by feeding people and the least she could do was let him.
He was doing the dishes with his back to her, which was either domestic or avoidant depending on how you looked at it. Probably both with him.
It had been the better part of a year since he'd walked back into her shop and she was still getting used to having someone to read.
Not that reading Jason was particularly difficult. He was loud about most things, even the things he thought he was being quiet about. She'd learned his tells before she'd learned to read above a middle school level and they hadn't changed as much as he probably thought they had. The concern was the same. The way he expressed it was just different now. Bigger and quieter at the same time, if that made any sense, which it did to her even if she couldn't have explained it to anyone else.
He'd spent six months running her through more combat training than she'd thought survivable. Bat curriculum plus everything he'd picked up after, from sources she didn't ask about and he didn't elaborate on. Brutal and thorough and occasionally she'd wanted to throw something very heavy at him.
She was better for it. She wasn't going to say that out loud either.
"You checked your kit?" Jason said, still not turning around.
"I checked my kit."
"Staff charge?"
"Full."
"Comm?"
"Jason."
He turned around. Looked at her with that specific expression that meant he was worried about her and calling it something else.
"I'm fine," she said, before he could ask. "I've been fine for the last several missions. I will continue to be fine."
"The Marchetti job you took a hit to the shoulder."
"And I told you at the time that it was fine and it was fine."
"You had a bruise the size of my fist."
"I have a high pain tolerance." She ate the last of the steak and changed the subject. "The food was good."
Jason's expression did something brief that he put away quickly. "There's more."
Of course there was. Cory slid off the counter and fixed herself another plate and didn't say anything about it and neither did he and that was how most things went between them these days. The important things lived in the gaps. She'd gotten used to reading them.
She was still getting used to having gaps worth reading.
The cat showed up while she was gearing up for the night.
Small, grey, one eye, the kind of battle scarred veteran that had been working Crime Alley's rooftops longer than most. She knew him. Called him Bishop. He had opinions about everything and expressed them at length and she respected that about him.
He slipped through the window she'd left cracked, landed without a sound, and sat down in front of her with the focused intent of someone who had information and knew its value.
Cory crouched down to his level.
The exchange took about forty seconds. Bishop was efficient when he had something worth saying.
When she straightened up Jason was leaning in the doorway watching her with the expression he'd stopped trying to hide about four weeks in. The one that meant he was filing something away under 'things about Cory Mora that are extremely unusual and that she will never explain.'
She didn't explain. She never explained. It was funnier that way and also none of his business.
"Docks," she said, pulling her hood up. "Late night shipments. Too frequent and too quiet. Bishop's been tracking movement for three days."
"Drugs?"
"Maybe." She picked up her staff, checked the charge one more time out of habit. "One of the others smelled blood two nights ago. A lot of it."
Jason's jaw did the thing it did when he was angry and keeping it contained. "We check it out tonight."
"I figured." She tossed him his helmet. "I've already synced the map overlay to your HUD. Try not to use your helmet as a battering ram this time, I'm sick of fixing it."
"I do that once—"
"Four times, Jay. Four."
He put the helmet on without further comment, which was basically an admission of guilt.
Cory checked her mask seals, ran a quick diagnostic, watched the HUD flicker to life with the quiet satisfaction of something she'd built herself working exactly the way she'd designed it to. Seven weeks of field work and she still got that. Probably always would.
"Ready?" Jason said.
She looked at him. Big and armored and restless the way he always was before a mission, all that contained energy looking for somewhere to go. Months ago she'd stood in her shop and looked at him across a mug of bad coffee and thought about all the years in between.
She didn't think about the years anymore. She thought about now.
"Ready," she said. "Let's go."
The scent hit her before they reached the docks.
Metallic. Wet. The particular wrongness of blood that had been sitting somewhere too long. Cory's pupils dilated without her telling them to, her senses sharpening in the way they did when something animal in her decided the situation required full attention.
She tapped her comm. "Slowing down. Something's off."
"Already?" Jason's voice was low in her ear.
"Blood scent. Not fresh." She killed her engine, coasted the last fifty meters on momentum alone and let the bike settle silently against a stack of freight containers. "A lot of it."
Jason pulled up beside her without a sound.
They moved on foot from there, Cory taking point without discussing it because that was how it worked. She was faster in the dark and quieter and her eyes didn't need a mask's light enhancement to see by. She could feel Jason behind her, a controlled presence, trusting her read on the environment the way she trusted his read on the tactical picture.
Weeks of this and they'd stopped having to talk through most of it. The training had seen to that.
The docks were quiet in the specific way of places that were pretending to be empty. Cory clocked it immediately. Too still. No ambient noise from the water's edge, which meant the wildlife had cleared out, which meant something had been disturbing this area consistently enough that nothing wanted to be near it anymore.
She crouched on top of a shipping container and let her senses do the work.
Six that she could smell. Armed, from the scent of gunmetal nearby. Clustered around one specific container that wasn't on any manifest she'd pulled earlier. The blood smell was stronger here, layered, days old underneath and something fresher on top of that.
She tapped her wrist console. Scanned the unmarked container.
Two heat signatures inside.
Small.
Human sized but small. The specific smallness of people who hadn't eaten properly in a while.
Cory went very still.
Tap. "Hood."
"Yeah."
"The container. Two signatures inside. They're alive."
A beat. "How small."
She knew why he was asking. "Kids."
The silence on the comm lasted exactly two seconds.
"We're going in," Jason said, and she could hear what was underneath it, the particular quality of his anger when it stopped being general and became specific, became personal, became the kind that had a target.
"Wait—" she started, already knowing it was too late.
It was too late.
Jason came out of cover like a pressure valve blowing, loud and precise and absolutely furious, and Cory was already moving because that was the job, because standing still wasn't an option, because there were two kids in that container and every second mattered.
She dropped from the top of the freight stack onto the nearest guard before he'd finished turning around. The staff connected with a crack of electricity and he went down hard. She was already pivoting to the next one, reading the angle of his reach before he'd committed to it, adjusting, hitting the pressure point Jason had drilled into her until she could do it without thinking.
She didn't have to think much anymore. That was the point of the brutal training Jason put her through. The body learned so the brain could stay clear.
"Two more behind the forklift," she called.
Jason dealt with them. He always dealt with them. She didn't need to watch to know.
Silence fell over the docks. Just the water and the distant sound of Gotham being Gotham and the blood smell thick in the cold air.
Cory was already at the container's lock, her fingers working the keypad by feel and by the mask's analysis overlay running quietly in the corner of her vision. The lock was decent. Not good enough.
It popped with a soft hiss.
She felt Jason move up behind her. She could read his tension in the specific quality of his stillness, the way he held himself when he was bracing for something.
She pushed the doors open.
The smell hit her first. Unwashed and afraid and underneath that something that made something animal and protective rear up hard in her chest.
Two teenagers. A girl and a boy. Shackled to the interior wall, filthy, blinking against the sudden light with the specific wariness of people who'd learned that attention usually meant something bad was about to happen.
The girl flinched when Cory stepped forward. Cory stopped immediately, lowered herself to a crouch, made herself smaller, let the girl look at her and decide.
She retracted the visor. Let them sse her eyes, the slit pupils that she'd stopped fully thinking of as strange because they were just hers, and watched the girl's expression move through fear into something uncertain and then something that was almost curiosity.
"It's okay," Cory said, and kept her voice low and even. "You're safe. We're getting you out."
The boy looked at Jason, who had filled the doorway behind her in full Red Hood gear and was radiating barely contained fury at the chains on their wrists.
To his credit Jason crouched down too. Made himself as small as he could manage, which wasn't very small but was the effort that counted.
"We've got you," he said, and his voice came out gruff but gentle in the specific way it did when he was feeling too much and had nowhere to put it.
The chains came off quick. Cory helped the girl to her feet carefully, feeling the way she flinched from touch and giving her space to find her footing. Beside her Jason was doing the same with the boy, one hand steady and undemanding, letting the kid lean on him or not as he chose.
They got them out of the container and into the cold dock air and Cory breathed through her mouth because the smell inside had been bad and the anger sitting in her chest needed somewhere to go that wasn't here, wasn't now, wasn't in front of two scared teenagers who needed calm.
They would've been gone by morning, she thought. Shipped out. Disappeared. Another two kids this city forgot to look for.
She knew what that looked like. She'd grown up watching it happen.
Not tonight.
Jason met her eyes over the kids' heads. She didn't need to see his face behind the helmet to know what he was thinking. They'd come from the same streets. They'd both seen what happened to the ones nobody came for.
They didn't say anything. They didn't need to.
They got the kids to Leslie Thompkins at twenty past one.
Cory had met Leslie exactly once before, briefly, in the context of Jason needing stitches he'd waited too long to get and Cory making him go. Leslie had looked at her over Jason's head with the expression of someone adding information to an existing file and hadn't asked questions Cory wasn't prepared to answer. She appreciated that about her.
Tonight Leslie took one look at the two teenagers and shifted immediately into the particular efficient warmth of someone who had been doing this a long time and had never gotten used to it and that was exactly why she kept doing it.
"They'll be okay," she said quietly to Cory while Jason stood with the kids and said something low that made the boy's shoulders come down slightly from around his ears. "Physically, anyway."
"Yeah," Cory said.
Leslie looked at her. "You did a good thing tonight."
Cory watched Jason crouch down to the girl's eye level, helmet off now, just a guy in a domino being as unthreatening as a man his size knew how to be. The girl said something. Jason listened with his whole body the way he did when something mattered.
"We did what needed doing," Cory said.
Leslie made a sound that wasn't quite agreement and wasn't quite disagreement and went back to her patients and Cory filed the whole exchange under things to not think about too hard and went to stand beside Jason.
They left the clinic at quarter to two and neither of them suggested going home.
The rooftop of Redwing Mechanics was cold in the specific way of Gotham in December, which was less about temperature and more about the wind off the river that found every gap in your gear and reminded you it was there. Cory had been on this roof enough nights that she'd stopped noticing it mostly.
She handed Jason the thermos she'd grabbed on the way up. He took it without looking, which meant he was still somewhere inside his own head.
She let him be there for a while.
Below them Crime Alley went about its late night business. Distant sounds. A dog somewhere. The particular rhythm of a neighborhood that never fully slept. Cory tracked it without meaning to, the way she always did, her senses running quiet background checks on the environment even when there was nothing to find.
Jason took a sip of the coffee and grimaced. "Why is it always this coffee?"
"Because it's terrible and you deserve it."
He laughed, low and rough. It was the first time since the docks and she felt something in her chest loosen slightly at the sound of it.
She looked out over the city. "They were about the same age," she said. "As us. When we were out there."
"Yeah." Jason's voice was quiet. "I know."
"I keep thinking about how many times someone could've stumbled across us and didn't." She turned the thermos over in her hands. "How many times we got lucky just by being the wrong kind of invisible."
Jason was quiet for a moment. "We weren't invisible. We just weren't worth the trouble to someone who could've done something."
Cory thought about that. Thought about a woman in a floral cardigan who brought deli turkey and didn't ask why a twelve year old was alone in Crime Alley. Thought about an old man who taught her to fix engines and paid her under the table and never once made her feel like a problem to be solved.
"Some people showed up," she said.
"Some people," Jason agreed.
She looked at him sideways. He was staring out over the city with that expression he got sometimes, the one that was tired in a way that went deeper than a long night, and she thought about the boy she'd known at ten who read stolen books on fire escapes and argued about everything and had never once in his life felt like he was enough for the people who should have told him he was.
She thought about a grave she'd visited every month for three years.
She thought about him standing in her shop with his helmet under his arm looking at her like he'd been holding his breath for months.
Some people showed up, she thought. And some people came back.
"You know," she said, "you could've let me stay out of this."
Jason glanced at her. "What?"
"The field. All of it." She kept her voice even, the way she did when she was saying something true that she didn't want to make too large. "You could've kept it to the gear. Kept me behind the comms. I would've complained but I would've stayed if you'd actually pushed for it."
Jason was quiet.
"But you didn't," she said. "You trained me instead. You gave me a way in."
"Cory—"
"I'm not looking for an explanation." She looked back out at the city. "I'm just saying."
Jason didn't say anything for a long moment. She could feel him looking at her with that specific quality of attention he had when he was feeling something he hadn't figured out how to carry yet.
"You could've walked away," he said finally. "After I showed up at the shop. You could've fixed the gear and kept your distance and none of this would've been your problem."
Cory considered that seriously. She thought about six months of brutal training that had left her better than she'd been. She thought about Bishop showing up with dock intel and two kids in a container and Leslie Thompkins' face and the boy's shoulders coming down when Jason talked to him.
She thought about what it meant to come from these streets and have the ability to make them safer and choose not to.
"Yeah," she said. "I could've. But I'd do it all again, anyway."
Jason looked at her. She didn't look back, kept her eyes on the city, but she felt it. That specific quality of his attention that he didn't give to many things and never wasted.
"Thanks, Stray," he said quietly.
She finally looked at him. Raised an eyebrow. "Don't get mushy on me, Hood. It's embarrassing for us both."
The corner of his mouth twitched. "Wouldn't dream of it."
They stood on the rooftop until the cold got serious about making itself known and the thermos ran out and Crime Alley settled into the quietest it ever got, which wasn't very quiet but was enough.
Cory thought about two kids who were going to wake up somewhere safe tomorrow.
That was enough to keep going.